Anyone with a license for FF Eureka: are old-style figures turned on by default?
I'm asking because I'm reviewing a book set in Eureka, and the text uses no ligatures. Yet the numerals are all old-style. Trying to decide if this is careless or weird.
0
Comments
Same thing in other nominally old style faces such as Palatino and TheSerif.
In Eureka, it may have something to do with the profusion of Slovak accents.
I’m not sure the relationship between old style figures and old style faces is particularly close—old style figures are quite promiscuous these days.
I’ve designed several “no ligature” serifed faces for newspapers (because of primitive pagination systems that don’t support ligatures), and at least one of them, Pratt, is an old style face with default old style figures.
(I thought that that might explain your book's typesetting, but actually Eureka Offc has lining figs so that's not a simple explanation for what you're seeing.)
To echo Nick, Millennial, my text font-in-progress, has default oldstyle figs and no default ligs, at least right now.
But I still thing it works perfectly well without them, which really makes them a bit of an affectation.
But perhaps such affectation would be good in the book you’re reviewing, Maurice?
at FontFont we generally offer fonts in two different desktop formats:
– OT/Pro with CFF outlines, varying standard figures and OpenType layout features
– Offc/Offc Pro with TrueType outlines, no OpenType layout features and always tabular lining figures as default figures.
So just check the character sets of the different formats (https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/eureka/regular#tab-glyphs) and have a look at the features (https://www.fontfont.com/fonts/eureka/regular#tab-features), then you can decide what’s right for you (→ Buying Options).
Eureka OT/Pro has old-style figures as the default figures and contains ligatures, of course.
Best,
Christoph
PS: Feel free to drop me a line at christoph☺fontfont.de if you have further questions about FontFonts.
The text has other quirks: it uses a combination of German and English quotation marks, which looks odd even if you choose one or the other systematically to match the language of the quote, and paragraph spaces are made with an extra line and a huge first-line indent. So I thought the missing ligatures was worth mentioning, too. I just wondered whether I'd be able to guess at what happened, and I thought the figures would be a clue: if oldstyle is on by default, then maybe the designer just forgot; but it would seem weird to me to remember to turn oldstyle figures on, but leave ligatures off.
As for the quotation conventions, that practice would certainly make Germans more considerate than Anglophones, since I don't think I've ever seen an English-language book that used guillemets for German-language quotes.